it's morning in america

America Remembers Handsome, Murdered President

John F. Kennedy was assassinated forty-seven years ago today. Where were you when you read The Warren Report, and then laughed? We will probably never know if H. L. Hunt hired Blackwater to shoot JFK in the head, but most people reject the Oswald conspiracy theories and have accepted that President Handsomepants’ violent murder was just another routine CIA hit job. Sarah Palin says that John Kennedy betrayed his religion, so maybe Jesus was the guy with the gun at the Grassy Knoll? We simply do not know. Many equate JFK’s assassination with the End of America’s Innocence. Apparently everyone still had a super clean conscience in 1963, even after we dropped all those atomic bombs. [Voice of America/The Atlantic]

Two Israeli soldiers who used a nine-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield during the 2009 Gaza Massacre will not be sent to prison, even though they are war criminals. Instead, these two soldiers will be demoted, from White Phosphorous Lieutenants to Bulldozer Cadets. Bummer! [Guardian]

Riley is an "internet blogger." He has written for such internet websites as True/Slant and the terrible Brangelina gossip emporium "The Huffington Post." Riley lives in northeast DC, near H Street. Maybe you do too and want to hang out?

Am I the only one in the world who never got the "handsome JFK" thing? Every picture I've ever seen of him, even young, just made me go, "Eh." JFK Jr. was handsome, but his dad? No.

CrankyLttlCamperette

Compared to Nixon, though…

Doglessliberal

I agree. He looks like a horse. And, I know this is sacrilege, but Jackie? Eh. Her face is all weird and squinty. Jill and Joe Biden are a lot hotter.

Failure_Artist

I think Robert Kennedy looked better.

Lazy Media

Screw you guys. Believing in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, given the evidence we know now, is not that far from Trutherism.

slappypaddy

it's clear that oswald did it with his supersonic long-barreled uzi, which was never found, and that he acted alone out of a psychotic spite against god, who had caused him to be photographed with a puzzling shadow coming from his nose.

the idea that someone might have had it out for president handsomepants, say some cubanos his dad did business with back in the rumrunning days who felt a little fucked over because sonny-boy crapped out on the whole bay of pigs class project, why, this is utter nonsense. no one would plot to assassinate a president over such a trifle.

and that little patsy oswald would in turn be gunned down by jack the ruby is easily explained. jack had syphilis and was mad, i tell you, mad. he didn't know he was at the police station shooting oswald, he thought he was in his favorite whorehouse, doing the squirt-squirt up the come-hole of his hottest trollop.

q. e. the motherfucking d., bitches.

SorosBot

It's been nearly 50 years; if there really was some vast conspiracy, someone would've talked by now. Look at Nixon; under his administration we had an actual government conspiracy to harass the President's political enemies and sabotage the election, and it all came out. All the various conspiracy theories ignore that no large conspiracy can last for too long before someone starts letting the secrets out.

Maybe it wasn't "large," and maybe people have been talking nonstop since the mid-60s. Maybe the stakes of killing a president are higher and more worth concealing than the stakes of a political burglary.

Also, someone needs to send DeMint a recipe for Hopeless Cause Muffins so he can get baking. I'm told they freeze well.

DemmeFatale

Yes, as the Snowbilly Grifter is adorning the cover of my NYT magazine, I cannot bear to open it. I sent a letter of protest to the Times (I believe I used the term "media-whore"). They won't print that, but the goal was simply to convey my sentiments.

now nine-year-old americans, they're not so small. might need neilist to weigh in on their bullet-stopping properties tho.

OobyDoobyDoo

Classy, that twat. Attacking a President for something he didn't say on the day he was assassinated. Boo.

cheetojeebus

I was a little tike on my dad's shoulders watching the parade the day before in Houston. My father remembers a lot of hate in the crowd that day. I just remember the black car driving by.
and, no shit, i was at the WTC the day before as well.

"American Tabloid" is awesome, poetry. "Cold Six Thousand" reads like an outline. "Blood's A Rover" is weird, even for Ellroy, like he just realized there are reasons people might go radical, and now all radicals are sexy gals/lefty college professors with amazing secret powers. And I'm tired of indulging his indulgence in racism. It's refreshing the first couple hundred pages, sickening after. Have you noticed that once he finally worked himself up to having actual "well-rounded," "human" black characters, he could only bring himself to do so by making them gay as well, unlike his square-jawed, degenerate main protags?

charlesdegoal

Get serious here for a minute: "Libra" by Don DeLillo beats them all, including *truth*.

Ellroy has said he reveres that novel, and that's why he didn't touch the assassination itself in "American Tabloid." Haven't read it, but I did see Malkovich's Steppenwolf adaptation in the early '90s. Bizarrely, it starred Laurie Metcalfe, "Roseanne's" sister, as David Ferrie. But then, you can't get more bizarre/creepy than a photo of the real David Ferrie.

Just read between the lines of Winter Kills by Richard Condon. That explains it all.

PsycWench

Does anyone know where Dick Cheney was on the day of JFK's assassination?

Krugmanic Depressive

He had other priorities.

trampndirtdown

Hiding in a bunker?

Bonzos_Bed_Time

Killing unicorns.

Hedley_Lamarr

Cheney (and Bush Sr.) Made 5 visits to the US Emabassy in Mexico City in the months prior to the assassination. Remember Mex City? That where Oswald hung out with the Soviets prior to the shooting.
I'm sure, if we dig hard enough, we can tie him to the Lincoln thing.

metamarcisf

I'd like to share a very funny joke on this solemn occasion:

Why did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone?

Because he could never remember his lines!

If you enjoyed this joke as much as I did, please send your tax deductible contribution to the Kennedy Center. Remember, if Ted Kennedy had driven a Volkswagen, he'd have been our 38th president.

Was she dumped by an ivy-leaguer once or something? Really, whence the bitterness?

Steverino247

If Nixon had been President during the Cuban Missile Crisis, none of us would be here to speculate.

I saw JFK when he came to San Diego and rode in an open top limo. People were pretty happy to see him, but the security guys (lots of Marines) were probably not, but then that's a pain in the ass to do that. All of us at school were convinced the Cubans did it because of how he stood them down over the missiles. Makes as much sense as any other theory.

no shit, you were THERE to see JFK in SD…wow you're even older than me…that is so cool!

barkingspiders

Sara Palin, articulating for the inarticulate. Or something.

BaldarTFlagass

Inarticulating for the inarticulate?

OobyDoobyDoo

Makes more sense than ANYTHING she's ever twatted.

V572625694

Ha ha, you you used "Sarah Palin" and "articulate" in the same sentence. This absurdity is refudiated daily by her Twats.

slithytovesss

Sarah Palin proves Berkeley's thesis that esse est percipi. As long as we are aware of her, she exists, that is why she will do every thing, every day in every way to keep us thinking about her.

TimeCubist

"I refute him thus!"

*kicks Palin in the head*

slithytovesss

Perfect.

SorosBot

The idea that America was innocent before the Kennedy assassination might have also come as a surprise to all the black people who kept getting beaten, shot and lynched throughout the 50s and early 60s.

V572625694

I'm so sick of this America's-lost-innocence meme. America lost its innocence when the Constitution counted slaves as 3/5 of a person in computing congressional representation. President Thomas Jefferson: carried into the Temple of Liberty on the shoulders of slaves.

Mindblank

Indeed, America was born a slut. We are open to everyone, just like the inscription on the Statue of Liberty says.

The lost-innocence meme is about preserving the sanctity of the 1950s, that anomalous decade when God was in his heaven, Ike was in the White House, and America fattened up on the spoils of WWII. I think the notion of America's "innocence" comes from Baby Boomers who were force-fed a pack of lies in that decade and then had a titanic tantrum about it in the next. Anybody born before 1940 knew this shit was never "innocent," no matter what lies they told their kids. What's even worse are the morons born since, like Sarah Palin, who believe in "innocence" only because they will never crack open a history book.

BerkeleyBear

And the Messicans who had lost their land, then their rights. Or the all the American citizens of Japanese descent whose government rounded them up and put in camps. Or the Native Americans whose treaties got broken and then they were rounded up and put on the rez. Or the Jewish Americans who still were dealing with open anti-Semitism 20 years after the Holocaust. Or the blacklisted Hollywood writers and other victims of the McCarthy hearings.

It is sort of like how Columbus "discovered" the "New World" – its only news to the last guy.

PsycWench

and to women who were denied access to post-graduate schools, expected to stay home once they married, and were paid less for the same jobs as men.

Oblios_Cap

We're still working on that wage equality thing, dontcha know.

SorosBot

Yeah, pretty much to anyone who wasn't a straight white Christian (and not too long before Protestant) male; but it would take all day to all the groups shat on by America back then (and still today, but not as badly).

Failure_Artist

Innocent is just a nice way of saying ignorant.

V572625694

But here's an odd one: somewhere between the shooting in Dealey Plaza and internment at Arlington, Kennedy's brain disappeared. No one knows what happened to it. Not saying it proves or disproves anything, just that it's weird.

I was in high school. The principal came over to our cafeteria table of wise-ass nerds and said the Prez had been shot. I remember thinking, "Johnson as president?" Because no one outside of the Senate or Texas knew what a political powerhouse he was. Or that, by refusing to call up the National Guard and Reserves to fight in Vietnam, he'd ruin both of them for a generation.

HistoriCat

Somebody dropped the jar holding the brain and then said "oh shit." After they swept up the glass and gray matter, it then became just another bureaucratic screw up. "We must have misplaced it."

Have you not heard about the secret Onassis-owned island where it is kept?

BaldarTFlagass

I can't wait for April 14, July 2, and September 6, so Sarah can tell us what or who Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley betrayed in order to rate their assassinations.

twaingirl

Lincoln freed them blacks, thus leading to one in the "White" house. He turned his back on the 3/5 a person rule! Wilkes Booth was just trying to preserve the sanctity of the Union!

slithytovesss

Re: "What were you doing when Kennedy was shot?" Jesus, some of you people are old.

NorthStarSpanx

This blows my perception of what the Wonkette demographic is.

TimeCubist

I well remember the shock, the numbing sense of loss. The astounded realization that Calvin Coolidge was now president.

BaldarTFlagass

Guilty as charged. Although at age 4, the actual shooting had no impact on me. All the televised foofaraw that followed, the lying in state and the funeral and such, did fuck with my TV viewing. I think Diver Dan was preempted for like 2 or 3 days in a row.

charlesdegoal

I was older than you and I don't feel guilty at all (I'm younger than that now). I also remember the preempted programs, on radio in my case, as I drove a friend and his girlfriend a couple of days afterwards from NYC to Godknowswhere PA, looking for an abortionist, to the sound of interminable dirges, all of us totally depressed. I even think it rained.

DashboardBuddha

Holy shit…that is a downer.

DashboardBuddha

I hope I didn't seem flip with my comment. I just had this image of three young people riding through the rain, dealing with the trauma of an abortion, all the while a Simon and Garfunkle style sound track playing in the background, inter-spaced with news about the Kennedy assassination. (I tend to think of things visually – like a movie).

I hope everything worked out.

charlesdegoal

Simon and Garfunkel would have been fine, but what we got was like Gregorian chants. And things didn't work out exactly as planned. Also, it was before the drugs. Thanks for caring, though.

not only alive (in study hall, but still, technically, alive) but also pretty fucking innocent. at the time, and all. aka ignorant.

Oblios_Cap

But we're still above ground! All we need to do is be faster or trickier than you young-uns.

I was pissed because they preempted my cartoons (they actually used to show those on TV on Saturday mornings, kids! And some were pretty damn good) for the funeral footage.

DemmeFatale

I was a little 4 year old in Japan. Very confused by Japanese people openly wailing in the street, and running up to us to express sympathy and shock.

jim89048

I was an audio-visual (we hadn't invented video yet) monitor in my 7th grade class. When the vice principal wheeled in the teevee without first asking my permission, I knew something big had happened, and that I would never again regain my powers. I mean, who gave that bitch the keys to MY closet?

horsedreamer_1

Sarah Palin wasn't even alive when JFK was shot, so how could we expect her to know anything about this?

NorthStarSpanx

But she knows that humans and dinosaurs co-existed 6,000 years ago. Where is your logic here?

horsedreamer_1

That's in the Bible, the very Bible that John Fitzgerald Kennedy denied.

Is there nothing, no matter how large or how small, that Palin can't comment on and embarrass our country yet again?

I had a girlfriend who was like Palin in this respect…she had no filter between what went on in her head and what came out of her mouth. There was nothing too awkward, creepy, or insensitive that she would utter. My senior year was one long face-palm. And the amazing thing is she hasn't changed after 31 years. We have run into each other on Facebook and she still does the same shit, except online…Just like Sarah.

Bonzos_Bed_Time

But did she put out in high school? Cuz' that makes it ok.

emmelemm

See, when you said "she hasn't changed in 31 years", I though the punchline would be, "She's now my wife."

DashboardBuddha

"I though the punchline would be, "She's now my wife widow." Fixed.

Seriously…I would have blown my brains out a long time ago. I don't know how the dude she married managed to last this long (another friend from highschool).

BTW – You folks probably don't remember this, but from a comment a long time ago about a friend of mine who is a birther, while at the same time belonged to a Big Foot "study" society…this is the same dude. Must be unending larfs at that house.

mavenmaven

The only worthwhile Presidents to Palin and her gang of tea baggers are the "Founding Fathers".
Oh, except Jefferson. And Ben Franklin and all the Deists.
Well, I suppose its not really them either, only the Constitution.
And not most of that either, except the second amendment. Yeah, that they like.

BerkeleyBear

Don't forget Adams, he of the strong central government and (gasp) National Bank. And Madison and Monroe for that matter, as one both framed up the original Constitution got his ass handed to him by the British and the other actually sought an end to the slave trade (interfering with private business). Basically I'm thinking the list of good Presidents for her ilk consists of Washington, Jackson, Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan (when they ignore the last 3's actual positions/programs/bailouts here and abroad). W is also on the list, but in that secret crush sort of way that makes them so cute.

Technically, Washington wouldn't be on that list because he actually worked hard to recognize Native Americans as a sovereign nation. That wouldn't fit into her white-is-best rhetoric.

rocktonsam

Keep fucking that chicken $arah.

NorthStarSpanx

Groan. There Sarah goes again, attacking anyone and all of 'em who aren't Sarah Palin. And the proof in the pudding that you can't take her at her own word on anything ever?:

Palin declared, “We deserve leaders that aren’t just going to take a partisan approach.” Bemoaning the “gridlock down there in Juneau,” Palin reminded Alaskans, “I have good relationships with these legislators.” An undisputed social conservative who backed a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, Palin nonetheless told an interviewer, “I don’t wear my faith on my sleeve.” And she promised not to let her religious beliefs “bleed into policy — that is my commitment.”

JoshuaNorton

I can still remember what I was doing when Kennedy was shot. I was watching "Mad Men".

Crank_Tango

we've thought the same thing about my grampa, who was quite the coon-hound.

also, elvis collected badges, and hated hippies, no? LOL I don't actually know about the hippy part tho, but probably.

SorosBot

He also hated illegal drugs, and didn't see the hypocrisy his own illegal abuse of prescription pills created with that.

Hippies and also the Beatles who ended up turning into hippies. The Beatles and the hippies turned his music irrelevant after being the coolest thing since sliced bread.

Apparently, he had a one night stand with Marilyn, so it is quite possible he was jealous or wanted to get back at JFK for Marilyn's sake. Another damning piece of circumstantial evidence that supports my implausible tin foil conspiracy is how Elvis died. Wracked with guilt over putting a hit on a president only to see JFK eclipse him in adoration due to the fact no one will see him age, he does himself in. There is a sub- crazy theory where Elvis fakes his death and is behind all the maladies connected to the Kennedys, John Lennon, and Altamont .

Rotundo_

I had heard E. died attempting to take a poop and had a heart attack in process. Seems he had an ongoing problem with constipation (nongoing). I think the theory that the Cubans and the Mob (with some charitable assistance from other wingers) took him out is probably pretty likely. He and Bobby pissed off a lot of disparate and desparate people.

"Ich bin ein Snowbillycunt"
or
"Ask not what you can do for your country – ask what you can grift from your country"

prommie

Riley, you kooky Konspiracy theorist, I bet you believe in chemtrails, and rodents of unusual size, too. Or that the anthrax mailings in 2001 were a psy-op campaign to panic the democrats in DC to follow along with Cheney's plan to triple the price of oil and seize the oil fields in Iraq. Get out of town with that crazy theory that Kennedy was murdered! Everyone knows that the Warren Commission concluded that he died of natural causes, of old age, and he went peacefully, in his sleep, a blessing, really. Oswald and Hunt's bullets shattering his skull, that was just an amazing coincidence, but the fact is, their attempt to assasinate him actually failed, becuase he was already dead before the bullets hit. Like the Warren Commission said, Kennedy died of natural causes, tragic, but certainly nothing criminal or any kind of Bush-CIA-Oligarchical coup or anything.

I bet all the members of the Warren Commission were Elvis fans who were in on the cover up.

CapeClod

I think people confuse "Innocence" with "Childish stupidity." This is how they can equate a serial adulterer with a story about a bunch English knights prancing around and singing about how great everything is.

arcane_allusion

What does Monty Python's Holy Grail have to do with this?

Wait a second, today is Terry Gilliam's Birthday. Did some one give him a really odd 33 birthday president by killing JFK.

Wait a sec, that's the same age that that Latino guy Jesus was also killed. It's all starting to make sense now.

prommie

When did this country turn back into a prudish nation of clucking scolds? People fuck. 95% of all supposed "virtue" is nothing but timidity and lack of opportunity. But people just looove the moral condemnation and looking down their noses at that awful adulterer. Fuck that shit, what next, you want to bring back the stocks, and the ducking stool, for people who dance too close?

CapeClod

"what next, you want to bring back the stocks, and the ducking stool, for people who dance too close?"

I wouldn't go that far, but a certain amount of self restraint on the part of the male members of the Kennedy clan, who were raised to believe that sexual entitlement was a birthright, probably wouldn't have been a bad thing, no?

DustBowlBlues

I was 16 when he was assassinated. I skip the JFK song in Assassins, poignant as it is.

Sorry, Riley: too soon.

Limeylizzie

Oh I love that song, just sad and wonderful

DemmeFatale

I saw Assassins in NYC, and was heartbroken when I saw my beloved Neil Patrick Harris walk into the book depository and unpack a rifle.

Limeylizzie

Wasn't it magnficent, I adored Denis O'Hare as well in that crazy stairway sequence.One of my fave theatre-going experiences ever.

DemmeFatale

I had always loved the "Ballad of Booth," so I knew this would be a great show, but this cast! Wow! Unforgettable!
(The next night we saw Wicked. Meh.)

Limeylizzie

MrLimeylizzie is a Production Designer, so he is always uber critical of the sets, but he adored the set for this so much that we went three times just so he could see it from dfferent angles! We saw Wicked in previews in 2002 and walked out at intermission, I loathed it.

Terry

Sarah Palin's quote about JFK shows her ignorance and lack of education. She has no clue at all about what it meant to be a Roman Catholic running for national office then. People talked about JFK wanting to place weapons in the Catholic Churches around the DC area as a part of the Papal takeover of the US government. She has no clue that just a generation ago that Catholicism was viewed with suspicion outside of the immigrant heavy areas (primarily cities with folks from Ireland, Italy, Poland and other parts of eastern and central Europe). She also has no clue that people from Irish families who arrived here during or after the Famine were looked down upon, even by Irish of earlier immigration waves.

The Kennedy boys, as my Mom calls them still, had their warts, but their hearts were in the right place. They cared about the welfare of people in Apalachia, for the rights of black people, that all Americans could get a fair shake.

barkingspiders

Dumb and vicious. On a national stage. For two years or more. Good times, good times.

To say nothing of the fact that Sore Loserman is now one of their besties. Funny how the worm turns sometimes.

RedneckMuslin

So sarah, JFK betrayed his religion and Oswald used his second amendment rights? Cunt.

RedneckMuslin

I'll bet the Orange Boner cried. He cries at a drop of a hat.

Terry

"Jim DeMint is hosting all sorts of bake sales, which will raise money for Joe Miller’s futile and pathetic attempt to steal Lisa Murkowski’s senate seat."

Is DeMint trying to assure that Murkowski doesn't vote strictly along party lines?

Limeylizzie

Mr Limeylizzie saw him in person when he was a Democratic volunteer in 1960, yes MrLimeylizzie is an official old and I am forever his child bride, and said he was so charismatic and incredibly handsome. I saw Billy Clinton in the early 90s and wanted to run up and smell him, he looked so gorgeous.

Limeylizzie

Although I enjoyed this typo from that article:

Kelly Emerson, newly elected Island County Commissioner, went further at a Tax Day rally, charging that FDR "threw up into the Great Depression." (Note to Kelly: The Depression began in 1929, Roosevelt took office in 1933.).

Oblios_Cap

If 9/11 and Presidential Assassinations are so Gawd-Awful for our nation, the least the government could do is make them paid holidays for all of us!

I can hear it now- "Happy Assassination Day to you, sir. And a Merry Terrorist Airplane Attack Day to you, also".

jim89048

I got the day of ronnie raygun's funeral off with pay, thanks to Ahnold being my ϋberfϋhrer at the time.

prommie

I was in my freshman dorm, the day Hinckley made his effort. I never got over the disappointment. But fucking Chapman, he had deadly aim.

Everyone knows that all of these people conspired together to have 28 gunmen placed around Dallas at one time to fire five shots from four different locations to kill the President of the United States in the middle of Dallas in the middle of the day.